A Certain Type of Poetry

For twenty years
she sat
by his side on the park bench
on the hill
and occasionally
patted his thigh
as they watched
the many different patterns of clouds
and storms and winds
and sunsets
that spoke to the sky
across the great world
at that time.

He wore brown trousers
that were not quite long enough to cover
his socks
and he would scratch his back
with a sideways motion
against the flaking green bench-wood
where they sat
and she would shake her head at him
and sometimes
he would point to a forest bird
or a rainbow parrot
he had spied in the near scrub
and she would note the scene
with a tiny nod of her head
or a raise of her eyebrows in mock surprise.


In late winters
she brought with them a rug,
to cover her waist and drape over her knees,
that was hand knitted
by her mother's mother,
and sometimes
out of a child's habit
she would rub the corner of that blanket
with a rippled thumb
and he would look
sideways at her
when she did so
and they would smile at each other
with their eyes.

Evenings on the park bench
came to be
a meditation
and the stillness around them
was interrupted
only by a wind gust
or the sound of her unwrapping
a lump of foil to reveal
a white bread sandwich
filled with last night's meat and
a sprinkle of carrot or lettuce.

In the years when their chests hurt
a little more
to get to the bench atop the hill
they saw below them
the town
had changed and grew greyer
and bigger and more foreign noises
from below
began to drift to them on the days
when the wind
was blowing at their faces
and the haze around the houses
became denser
and they both saw it
and they both knew what it meant and
neither said anything to each other about
the thing called progress.

When the body of
their only son
was brought home from
the Great War
full of shrapnel
they spent the cold morning
of the sad night before
on the bench
speaking little but
linking together their fingers and watching
the angry storm clouds
roll over the far hills and she sobbed
and he held her hand a little tighter
and steam rose into the cold morning air
from a flask of tea at their feet.

Sometimes in the summers
Dragonflies would zip and skirt around them
and she got so use to the noise of them
the sound became
a kind of solace to her
and in her notebook
she got to sketching
the pink wildflowers that sprung up
inside the fern mounds on the hill
or the clouds over the bay
and she filled in
the other spaces on
the pages
with disjointed words
that came to her from she knew not where
but in them she saw
a certain type of poetry.

After his operation
when the crooked scar
that ran down his chest was still blue
and purple and black
he would sometimes stand
and move his fragile arms in circles
like the nurse had shown him
and she would sit behind
on the bench
and fret that he would
someday clutch for
his chest
again
and then she
worried more
about him and then about herself and
then about what it means
to be alone or lonely.

When the hill was lost
to the developers
the local paper counted the days
until the park would close and together
on the final day
they made their way
to the bench
and around them were people
the age their Son
would have been
and most had children with them,
that ran and screamed and laughed
and other people from the town
were there
and others from smaller towns
and together they celebrated
the view
and the forest and the birds
and even the buzz of the dragonflies
and she wrote words
in her notebook
and those words were about
memories and storm-clouds
and dragonflies
and brown trousers and a thing called progress

and later in the town,
those words would
become a certain type of poetry
and she would smile at him with her eyes
and sometimes
pat his thigh, with a wrinkled hand
and there they both stayed
until the sun did set
one final time.